Provide Practical Detail on the Big Picture Concepts

A clear and entertaining writing style outlines the concepts every OS designer needs to master.

In-depth topic coverage includes processes, threads, memory management, file systems, I/O, deadlocks, interface design, multimedia, performance tradeoffs, and the newest trends in OS design.
Multimedia file systems are covered–an important topic that most books miss. The chapter on Multimedia Operating Systems has been moved to the Web, primarily to make room for new material and keep the book from growing to a completely unmanageable size.
A thorough treatment of computer security includes viruses, worms, malware and other digital pests. This chapter far exceeds anything written in any other book. It also discusses ways to combat them.

Keep Your Course Current

Coverage of multiprocessors, multicomputers, virtual machines, and distributed systems reflects that the field is rapidly moving from an era of single-processor systems to multicore systems, multiprocessors, and distributed systems.
Case studies of popular operating systems: UNIX, Linux, Windows 8, and Android
- NEW: Chapter 10, on UNIX, Linux, and Android is a revision of the old Chapter 10. The focus is clearly on Linux now, with a great deal of new material about Android, which was not in the previous edition.
- NEW: Chapter 11 in the 3rd edition was on Windows Vista. A chapter on Windows 8, specifically Windows 8.1, has replaced that. It brings the treatment of Windows completely up to date.
NEW and UPDATED: Chapters 2—6 have been updated, with older material removed and some new material added.
- Chapter 2: Added information on the futex synchronisation primitive, and a section about how to avoid locking altogether with Read-Copy-Update.
- Chapter 3: More focus on modern hardware and less emphasis on segmentation and Multics.
- Chapter 4: CD-Roms are removed, as they are no longer very common, and replaced with more modern solutions (like flash drives). Also, we added RAID level 6 to the section on RAID.
- Chapter 5: Older devices like CRT and CD-ROMs have been removed, while new technology, like touch screens have been added. The sections on current research in these chapters have been rewritten from scratch. New problems and programming exercises have been added.
NEW: Chapter 7 is completely new. It covers the important topics of virtualisation and the cloud.
NEW and UPDATED: Chapter 8 is an updated version of the previous material on multiprocessor systems. There is more emphasis on multicore systems now, which have become so important in the past few years. A long section on VMware has been added.
NEW and UPDATED: Chapter 9 has been heavily revised and reorganised, with considerable new material on exploiting code bugs, malware, and defenses against them.
UPDATED: Chapter 12 is a revised version of Chap. 13 from the previous edition.
A Research section in many chapters describes current research in the topic covered by the chapter.

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Modern Operating Systems: Global Edition, 4th edition

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